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Monday, November 4, 2013

Three things I do to be a better writer

1. Read
~ I was musing on this yesterday. Why read when I could be spending the
time writing? The answer: Reading helps me with grammar, dialogue,
chapter endings, hooks, character arcs, etc etc. I'm not talking about
plagiarism but learning from others style. Why did they start the book
here? How do they build worlds? Who is the protag? What is the inciting
incident? I may not ask these questions as I read but when I finish, I
often ponder on what I can take away from reading the particualr story
that will strenthen my writing.

Over on a friends
writerly blog, she posted three things she does to be a better writer.
That got me thinking: if I wrote a post about what I do, what would I
say?

2. Write
~ Every. Day. I don't care if it's blog posts or editing a chapter or
writing 500 words, daily writing trains my brain and fingers. This
reminds me of something I learned when I took anatomy in college. We
have blood vessels feeding our heart and keeping it humming. For ease of
this illustration, let's say you have twenty little vessels in your
heart. If you experience a heart attack, fifteen vessels die. Ouch!
That leaves five to work and that's not much. For health sake, Doctors
suggest exercise to help our hearts. Why? Here is one reason: more blood
vessels.

As we exercise, our heart pumps more blood
and pumps it faster. So guess what our remarkable body does? "Grows"
more vessels in our heart to help with the extra blood flow. Isn't that
amazing? But why is it amazing and how does it apply to writing?

When
you start exercising on a regular basis, your heart soon develops more
blood vessels until you have, say, forty vessels. This time, if you have
a heart attack and fifteen blood vessels die, how many are left?
Twenty-five! Much better than five. It's worth it to get some physical
exercise daily if you can, don't you think?

If we
can write every day our writing grows and develops and strengthens. We
find we are ready to write/edit as soon as we sit down to our computers
or paper. When a crisis comes up and we need to miss a day, hopefully
our writing muscles have enough vessels to carry on and keep the
creativity humming until we can return again. Miss too many days and it
feels like starting over or it takes longer to get started. Writing
daily helps strengthen our good habit and skills. I promise you will
benefit from it.

3. Learn
~ I began writing five years ago. This great story was rolling around
inside my head, waiting to be written and read. After typing it out, I
thought my baby was ready to debut. HA! I had not learned much about the
writing, except what my English teachers tried to teach me. But there
is more to writing then proper nouns, grammar and dangling modifiers. I
needed to be educated. I read books, went to writer's conferences and
joined a critique group. I will admit I've come a long way, but there is
still much to learn. Which is good because learning keeps my brain and
creativity fresh.
Never stop learning. I take one day out of
the week to go through blog posts that teach me something from my craft.
Then I usually take time to read about writing/editing/marketing as
well. Many of my published author friends admit they can still learn
more.

3 comments:

#2 is hard for me, for weird reasons. It's difficult for me to write every day because I write every day. I have a writing job. So I'm writing, but not necessarily working on my fiction. And after writing all day, sometimes it's really different to write.

I'm over-achieving on #1 though, maybe.

As for #3, there was a point early in my attempts to write fiction where I thought reading books about writing was like admitting I couldn't write, when I'd had a ton of writing classes. Later I figured out how wrong I was, and that I needed to keep learning. That one is always a good reminder. We never reach the point where we don't need to learn.